This content was originally included in an issue of The Duelist magazine. The original article can be accessed via Internet Archive here.

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Main Magazine Page: The Duelist #1

In 1985, Richard Garfield graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in computer mathematics. After two years with Bell Labs , Richard returned to his alma mater to obtain a Ph.D. in combinatorial mathematics. Since 1992, Richard has taught at Whitman College in Walla Walla , Washington. In June he plans to leave teaching for a while to concentrate on game design with Wizards of the Coast.

What is a professor of mathematics doing designing adventure games?

Well, I’ve been designing games for—let’s see. I’m thirty—for fifteen years, so it’s been a long time hobby of mine. I never really expected to make a career out of it; I stuck to more traditional careers, more reliable income. It was more my interest in games which brought me to mathematics than the reverse, probably. The sort of thought you use in my field, combinatorics, is often the sort of thought you use in playing games, solving puzzles, and the like.

Do you have any roleplaying experience in particular, or is it mostly with board games?

Well, I haven’t designed roleplaying games since I was, oh, twenty. Back then I concentrated on homemade systems for Chivalry and Sorcery™, and before that Dungeons and Dragons™. I’ve played a lot of different roleplaying games in my life. Many people who run roleplaying games design roleplaying material as well. I haven’t roleplayed for a long time, other than small episodic games—no full scale campaigns. I have a lot of respect for roleplaying as a hobby, but almost everything I’ve designed recently has been a board game. It seemed there was an abundance of roleplaying material already available. The variety and range of quality was huge, but you could almost always find something that would suffice. After all, my objective in designing games has always been to supply the sort of games I wanted to see and which weren’t available.

Had you ever had any of your games published prior to Magic?

No. Although I’ve got maybe fifty games in my closet designed to the point where I’ve actually played them with friends, RoboRally is the closest to being published. In fact it was purchased from me for publication by FASA, who gave it back after sitting on it for two years. RoboRally is what connected me with Wizards of the Coast in the first place.

I understand that Roborally played a large part in Magic’s beginnings. How exactly did Magic become connected with Wizards of the Coast?

Well, Mike Davis (my partner in RoboRally) and I had just met with Peter Atkison and Jay Hayes to discuss the game, in another ultimately failed attempt to see RoboRally published. Well, not really failed: they were going to publish it last year, and now it is on schedule again for spring 1994. I’d asked Peter if there were any other games he was interested in seeing made, and he suggested something which required very little equipment and very little time to play, say between fifteen and twenty minutes. So that’s what set me to thinking. The whole concept came together very quickly, because I had a lot of the basic pieces already lying around. For example, I had a game for which the deck would change every time you played it. When a card got destroyed in the deck, you ripped it up, and if a card got added, you made a new one and put it in. It wasn’t exactly the kind of game you could publish without seeming like you were out to get the public. But the basics were there; I combined that idea with a bunch of others I had lying around.

What happened after the initial idea? I understand this game took two years to playtest; what are the steps, generally, that go into developing a dinner conversation into a game like this?

Well, it’s impossible to generalize. I’ve never been involved—I don’t think anybody has— with a game like Magic or with a playtest process like Magic. All the other board games and card games which I designed were vastly easier to playtest. The hardest part was the initial three months of thought, coming up with a chassis for the game which would handle the requirements which were set upon it. For example, there was the requirement that everyone should be able to play with any selection of cards they liked from the available cards. And that required a lot of decks to play around with. Actually, when we got to the next step, when it was actually good enough to make cards and give them to my friends, it was a lot of fun. It was an exciting environment, something we had never seen before. Throughout the playtest period the sophistication of the play environment kept growing. It acquired a lot of depth; I had hoped for that, but hadn’t counted on it.

Was it in the playtest process that the seemingly infinite number of Magic variants developed? The game hasn’t been around very long, but there are numerous versions of the game that were not originally captured in the rules. That seems to be part of its addiction, the fact that there is so much variety within a given set of parameters.

The variations have certainly been more prevalent since it hit the market, because in playtesting I was usually around to make sure that people were playing the same game. People were taught how to play verbally. The idea was that eventually there would be rules printed up so that eveyone would be playing the same game. But there was always some experimentation, because after all, every time you played a game it was a new deck and every time you played against somebody new it was a new game. In many ways varying the rules is simply an extension of the premise of the game.

You have said that Magic isn’t really about two people dueling; it’s more about the participation of everyone who plays Magic in one gigantic collective game. What do you mean by that?

There is a foundation game where two people sit down and play a game of Magic, to have this duel or that duel. But anybody who plays Magic for any length of time knows that this sort of fades in importance, or at least in the amount of time spent, before trading, bartering, discussing strategy, and so forth. This for me is a very important part of the game. The associations you and I make can greatly affect our interactions in our play group. If I can convince you that your Force of Nature is being wasted in your deck, and should actually be in my deck, and can trade you something in return to make your deck work much better, then the next time we play with everybody else the game has changed. You might say that the duel is to Magic what combat is to a roleplaying game. In a lot of ways, a big part of the game is storytelling, talking about the cards. Even in playtesting, there were rumors of cards that weren’t out there, or which were out there but someone had put in a closet and couldn’t find anymore. Stories would evolve about the world itself. I consider that part of the game.

How does the multiverse of Dominia, which you describe briefly in your introduction to the rulebook, play a part in Magic: The Gathering? After all, you can play the game without engaging in Dominia conceptually. Why is Dominia part of the collectable trading card game?

The concept for Dominia naturally extends from the concept of the game itself. In the game, players are given a piece of an unknown world. They will learn about the game universe by playing in it, talking about it, by trading, experimenting with cards. The natural evolution of the game involves the release of more cards so the game doesn’t remain finite, but is always growing and changing. This extends to the concept of a multiverse, where there is endless possibility—not one world but many worlds. In Magic, the way the cards mix and match is wierd; why, for example, would Arabian Nights cards be mixed in with the Ice Age cards? One way to understand this is through a multiverse of planes: the cards describe some small collection of planes, which expands and becomes more comprehensible as more cards are encountered.

Do you think that, with the release of other Deckmaster products, Dominia will become a larger part of the way people play the game?

People will always be able to play Magic as a card game. For those who want a world to hang their fantasies on, I think Dominia will be developed a little bit more. There are certainly efforts in that direction. The more I think about it, the less the multiverse becomes a mere aside to the game.

How do you think the collectability of the cards affects the game, particularly the roleplaying experience? Is card collecting an integral part of the play process in some way?

here are several meanings to the term collectable. For a gamer it means that many of the cards are hard to get. If there is a card I want, then unless I’m rich I have to negotiate for it. That adds a social aspect to the game, and yes I think it is a very important part of the game. It irritates some players that some kid can walk in and get a booster pack and the kid will have a card in that deck that they don’t have, and can’t simply buy. It’s part of the game, and players have to deal with that. They can deal with that either by trading with the kid before the card is covered with chocolate stains, or by finding some friend who will trade with them, or by taking solace in all the cards they have that others don’t. That’s part of the game, just as the constant development of characters is essential to roleplaying. Would you enjoy roleplaying a character with all the equipment and abilities in the game? Your limitations define your character as much as the character’s abilities do.

Were you surprised at how addictive, how popular Magic has become? Are there elements that playtesting and marketing the game generated which weren’t part of the original design?

Every time more people joined the playtest crowd, the environment got all the more interesting. It wasn’t like another game—like a board game, say, like RoboRally. The more people were in contact with RoboRally, the more people were interested in RoboRally—that’s it. People would bring some kind of personality to the game, but really it was a very one-dimentional thing compared to Magic. The more people got involved with Magic, the more the game developed: the world size grew, more cards were around, more varieties of play experience developed, and more perspectives on the game were available. It was natural. I think it must be hard for a player of Magic to realize the impact of going from handmade card-stock cards, with black-and-white art xeroxed from comic books, to the cards which Jesper’s put together, which of course looh stunning. I knew that they would be collectable because people were already collecting those little pieces of card stock—of course they were going to collect the final product! In themselves, they are ten times, a hundred times much more collectable—orders of magnitude better. And they still have all the things which made them collectable before: in particular, their effect on their effect on the metagame, which I keep coming back to.

I think there are a lot of aspects of the game which conspire to make it so addicting. Short play time, generally—its colorfulness. Also, oftentimes two-person games are much too confrontational. Chess—I think chess is a great game, but a lot of people don’t like playing it because if the other person is better than they are they get crushed. At least that is their perspective; their loss seems like a fault, as if they didn’t think hard enough or something. But in Magic people can disassociate themselves from losing. There is the great equalizer, luck, but this game has something more. People’s decks are losing, but the people themselves aren’t. I mean, people play with what is fun to play with, and they build their deck however they like. Somehow the responsibility for the game, personally, is lessened. Yet there is a lot of skill to deck assembly and play. It allows very competitive people to play with those who aren’t so competitive without either person getting hurt, or feeling they lost out on something. These types of games are my favorite, because sometimes I like to kick back, relax, play a game, and not be threatened by it. Other times I want to go for the throat and play as cleverly as I can.

One other thing I think lends to its popularity is the fact that, really, there aren’t that many new game ideas out there, I know that I go to a game store three times a year. I’ve got my money in my pocket and I’m ready to buy whatever games I want; maybe I can’t afford it, but I’m going to treat myself. A lot of times when I go to a game store I walk away without anything; the reason is because when I go there, there is often nothing new, just the same old stuff dressed up differently. This was illustrated repeatedly by the rejection of RoboRally, on the grounds of it not fitting into any of the game companies’ “universes.” It is a credit to Wizards of the Coast that they allowed Magic to be published as I presented it rather than cramming it into a Primal Order or Talislanta framework. It would have weakened the game. I think that there are people out there who like playing games, who like getting into something new, and Magic appeals to them.

I did actually think that it was going to be very successful, as of course so many people who backed it from the start did also. But as sucessful as it has been? I don’t know. I do remember calling Peter many times and saying how nervous I was because the whole idea seemed extremely viral. People liked talking about the idea of the game enough that it seemed like it was spreading on its own. There was always that fear that it would fall whole-heartedly into somebody else’s hands before we got a chance, with our small company’s resources, to put something together.

Are you worried about what’s happening now—all these Magic-inspired collectable trading card games bubbling up here and there?

Umm, no. No, I’m excited by it. Now that my ideas have been realised, and we have gotten released first. I’m interested in seeing what comes out. People following Magic will have an easier time of it than we had, because they have something to model themselves on. That was really the hard thing about Magic: there were so many things for which there weren’t any precedents. There wasn’t anybody we could call and say ‘what should we do here— this doesn’t work’ or ‘how are we going to handle this problem’ because nobody had solved any of those problems before. We’ve solved a lot of those problems in Magic. But our competitors are still going to have a hard time, I believe. I think that designing a trading card game is much harder than designing a board game or a card game. I know. That’s a fact— nobody would argue that. There were problems in there that people setting out to design will not know exist until they run into them. And I’m sure many people will make it through, and we’ll get a lot more really good games. I’d like to see that. I’d like to see this field evolve.

Do you have an idea where the Deckmaster products will go—how they will be indebted to Magic, and what challenges they will face that are different than those Magic encountered? Will it be inventing an entirely different game?

I have no clue. I know that in my second game. I’m having a lot of difficulty getting all the pieces right; Magic doesn’t seem to have provided so much help for me there. I really have no clue what form the others’ trading card games will have.

Do you have a general direction you want to see the Deckmaster products go in?

Yes, I would like to see it go into simpler games. Magic was never a massmarket game. I was hoping that it would be popular with game hobbyists; otherwise, it would need to be simpler. I expect the Deckmaster line to develop simpler and simpler games, hopefully without sacrificing the kaleidescope of colors that has generated so much enthusiasm.

Do you have any feel for how Magic: The Gathering, separate from other Deckmaster games, will evolve—how play will change? In your editorial for this issue of The Duelist, you mention the difference between the wild play environment and the structured play environment, and suggest that the general movement is away from everybody getting very excited and trying to build these unbeatable decks towards using the tools that you have on hand, and posing that as the challenge. Working within a structure—the difference between duplicate and contract bridge, that sort of development. Do you think Magic is headed in that direction?

I think that with what we have right now, Magic, it’s necessary that people take the deckbuilding only so seriously. I think the wild free-for-all and the more structured environments will both exist. The less competitive and the less resourced players will always be able to really compete and build whatever decks they want. The more competitive players may find that building more and more powerful decks in an unstructured and card-rich environment makes the game less fun. In the future, it’s possible that our card mix will be such that even the well-resourced players, the very competitive ones, will be able to build decks without boring themselves. Other people will take it upon themselves to restrict themselves and others in various ways, limiting the development of decks that are not much fun to play or play against. They may be fun to develop; that was certainly a conscious decision on my part. At the beginning we were thinking ‘oh, we shouldn’t have these card combinations available because they’re too powerful.’ But after a while I realized that everyone was having a blast finding these powerful combinations, “killer decks” as they’re often called, and so I stopped being really careful about it. So yes, I think both environments will exist. It’s easy to find the wild environment because that is sort of how the game begins, but the structured environment is not as easy to find. A lot of serious people play and think ‘oh, this is a great game to play, but after a while, with all these decks that are so powerful and boring to play, why should we bother?’ The structured environment allows you to deal with that. Players have an enormous amount of control over the sorts of games they are playing.

Are you disturbed by any of the directions Magic has gone: certain destructive tendencies, things that bother you about the way the game has taken off? Or does it have its own life now, separate from the designer’s intentions?

It’s certainly had its own life, separate from the designer’s intentions, ever since its early playtest days. Am I displeased with any of those things? No, no, not really. It’s exciting to me to see the variety of people who have been brought together by the game. I’ve no real complaints yet. It hasn’t been out there long, so I don’t know its longrange effects. If the market becomes flooded with trading card games of various and sundry quality as a result of Magic, I’ll be disappointed.

Has developing Magic affected your life in any unexpected ways; has it directed you along paths you never thought you’d follow?

Yes, absolutely. Next year I’ll be leaving teaching for a year, perhaps a couple years, to enter the game industry. I never would have felt confident enough in the game industry to do that without Magic’s success. Certainly, no matter how successful RoboRally is, it would never have led to that. The game has had very major affects on my life in general. The friendships that have been forged designing this game and putting it together are very strong; they probably wouldn’t have developed without the game. Spending so much time on something over such a long period of time is bound to affect you.

How about on your students—has it had any effect on the classroom at all?

The game was fully developed by the time I became faculty at Whitman. My teaching has been full-time. Now there is a growing awareness of Magic among the students. I get questions, about equal parts cards questions and ‘where can I get decks’ questions. But its effect on my students has been very small.

Do you think you’ll go back to teaching eventually, after a few years in the gaming industry?

It all depends. I enjoy teaching; there is a good chance I will return.

Do you have a favorite game designer, someone who in your mind has made a significant contribution to the gaming industry?

Well, I’ve already given my undying praise of Cosmic Encounter, both the original from Eon and Mayfair’s excellent reprint. Certainly Tom Jolly, Wiz War. Oh, Francis Tresham, the fellow who made 1830 and Civilization: any two games that are so different shows talent to me. Those are some games off the top of my head. I’ll probably kick myself later for forgetting my all time favorite game or something. Oh, and an amazing book came out last year by Schmittberger, New Rules for Classic Games. It is a must for a game enthusiast.

We were also interested in your sources of inspiration. Outside of developing Magic, and your work as a professor, what kinds of things do you do, what do you find inspirational? Not that you necessarily have a life outside Magic and teaching; it seems like those things would take an awful lot of time.

Recently it hasn’t felt like I’ve had much of a life outside of Magic. Well, certainly all forms of literature; fiction is one thing I stick to, even in the depths of my darkest time-consumption nightmares. I read before I go to sleep, and often in the morning; I try to alternate between science fiction/fantasy books and other forms of fiction. Movies—I love movies. I’m a movie glutton. I haven’t seen any for a long while, but when I was at Penn, I averaged probably a movie a week. And I would see dreadful films and amazing films, and I would enjoy them all. I had the capability of criticizing each of them, but that didn’t mean I didn’t still enjoy them, both mainstream and alternative. I enjoy cross-country skiing, and crayfish-hunting—those are when I’m in the Northwest. Family: visiting family and friends is very inspiring. And certainly—I meant to mention this before—playing games. I haven’t done much of that either, recently. Certainly I couldn’t design games without enjoying playing them. I know some designers that I think would disagree; they prefer just to design them. I couldn’t do that. I like to have a game group that meets once or twice a week— to play anything, from card games to board games to roleplaying games.

What kinds of card games do you play?

Any kind of card game. I think it’s easier to name the card games that I don’t play. I mean I even play war. Although with war you have to make it interesting. Last time I played war we played that every time you won a war, you got to add a new rule to the game. The rules began with something like if you played an eight, it would automatically win, and evolved into if you played the Queen of Spades you had to run around the room shrieking. And then there was the sort of global rule that said if you forgot a rule then you lost a card. So, any kind of game. I play bridge, I play hearts—several games from the Far East I won’t mention because they probably won’t be recognized. Poker. Poker is an amazing game, often under-recognized for its strategic game value. And in all of these games, I play the original forms and respect them (except for war, where I don’t respect the original) but I also play mutant forms.

I have played so many bizarre forms of hearts that I’ve considered writing an entire book of hearts. I’m probably regarded, by some of the faculty members at Penn, as having set back mathematical progress by some number of years. Part of that was the fact that I would constantly distract people, and one of the things I would distract them with was a hearts ladder. The game was sort of a blend of English-American hearts and Chinese hearts, which I called Turbo hearts. We had this Turbo hearts ladder for several years, and it was a lot of fun. Many people were weaned on this and consider regular hearts boring and vanilla.

Well, I wouldn’t want to leave out this last, very important question, which has to do with your socks, Richard. I understand that you don’t often wear the same kind of sock on both feet. Our project coordinator, Vic Wertz, was interested in a detailed explanation of this phenomenon, and what it perhaps expresses about you.

Well, I would expect Vic to get right to the heart of things. I’m glad he asked such an insightful question. When I was at Bell Labs—I worked at Bell Labs for a couple years—I stopped matching my socks for a while because it was just too time-consuming. After a little while, when I got back to graduate school, I thought ‘ok, let’s match all my socks.’ So I tried to match all my socks, and I came up with seventeen socks with no mates. I had no clue where the others had gone, whether perhaps I had just worn one without the other for enough times that they looked different, or whether they legitimately didn’t have a mate. It seemed like a waste to throw them all away, so I said ‘forget it; it saves me time anyway.’ So now I have a sock box, a very large box in my closet filled with socks, and I reach in and grab two. I’m beginning to take more care these days. Sometimes I go for particular types of contrast, like matching my left sock with my pants and my right with my shirt. Also, I get such a hard time when I actually do draw a matching pair that oftentimes I’ll throw one back in, which I used to not do. My friends have encouraged me in this; I was recently visited by a friend from the East Coast, who brought me six, eight different socks, one from each of her friends. My family has fought it, of course, with the traditional tactic of giving me all socks the same color. So I have a large number of these gray socks, one of which is on my left foot right now. But my family is hopelessly outnumbered, because my sock box is way too big for them to make a significant impact. They’ve given up.

Well, is there potential for another collectable trading game here, collectable trading socks?

Maybe this was the inspiration for the cards. But I’ve never traded anybody my socks.